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Was Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State?

Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was being lauded as an exemplary secretary of state. After four years and nearly a million miles logged as America’s top diplomat, she stepped down to a torrent of praise. “The most consequential secretary of state since Dean Acheson,” enthused Google’s Eric Schmidt. “Stellar,” pronounced Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson. Even Republican Sen. John McCain, while criticizing her response to the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi, went out of his way to compliment her “outstanding” State Department tenure.

When the Atlantic published an admiring 10,000-word profile of Secretary of State John Kerry the other day, the surprise was not so much that the author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, found himself impressed by the headlong diplomatic forays of the peripatetic Kerry, but the downbeat assessment of Kerry’s much more reserved predecessor. The headline? “How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton.” A few days later, the New York Timeschimed in with an article on the “tough comparisons with Kerry” Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter” in her years as secretary.

All of which yields the question: Was Hillary Clinton in fact a good secretary of state, and will her record as a diplomat matter if, as expected, she runs for president in 2016?

As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of good is. Certainly, even many of her most ardent defenders recognize Hillary Clinton had no signal accomplishment at the State Department to her name, no indelible peace sealed with her handshake, no war averted, no nuclear crisis defused. There are few Eric Schmidts out there still willing to make the case for her as an enormously consequential figure in the history of Foggy Bottom.

Where the debate tends to rage is over why that is so, especially now that Kerry is taking on diplomatic challenges that Clinton either couldn’t or wouldn’t—from negotiating a potentially historic nuclear deal with Iran to seeking a revived Mideast peace process—and political rivals in both parties return to thinking of Clinton in the hypercharged American political context and not so much as the tireless, Blackberry-wielding face of global glad-handing.

I asked an array of smart foreign policy thinkers in both parties to weigh in, and they pretty much all agreed that Clinton was both more cautious and more constrained than Kerry. Their argument is over whether and to what extent that was a consequence of Clinton herself, the limits placed on her by a suspicious and eager-to-make-its-mark first-term White House, or simply it being a very different moment in world politics.

Here’s Aaron David Miller, who negotiated Middle East peace for five presidents and is now a scholar at the Wilson Center, making the case for cautious Clinton: “Hillary was risk-averse; Kerry isn’t. He’s risk-ready.” Of course, Miller argues, 2016 politics “explains partly why she didn’t own a single issue of consequence.” The other reason is President Obama himself, “the most controlling foreign policy president since Nixon.” Miller’s bottom line: “She was a fine secstate but not consequential.” As for 2016, “It won’t hurt her other than the Republican obsession with Benghazi, but it won’t help her that much either.”

An array of foreign policy thinkers all agree that Clinton was a more cautious and more constrained secretary of state than Kerry. | Reuters

What does that Republican take look like? For sure, there will be a focus on Benghazi, where the GOP has questioned whether Clinton and other administration officials were activist enough—and truthful enough—about responding to the attack in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, that led to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other American personnel; a case summed up by the American Enterprise’s Institute’s Danielle Pletka as “unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to lead, willingness to stab a lot of people in the back. And dead people.” Pletka’s broader view of Clinton’s record is a harsher version of what I hear from many Democrats: “the Washington consensus,” Pletka says, “is that she was enormously ineffective … [though] no one was quite sure whether she was ineffective because she wanted to avoid controversy or because she wasn’t trusted by the president to do anything.”